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Can Beckett’s masterpiece make sense to an audience that has never seen a play? Our reviewer flies to Cape Town to see

Only Gandalf could have conjured up something so improbable and, as it happens, he did. There was Ian McKellen, world famous for his playing of the antique warlock, on a makeshift stage in a gymnasium in the poorest township in South Africa. And what was the production? Why, the Haymarket’s triumphant revival of, in McKellen’s words, “a notoriously difficult play that even our London producers at first thought could never be popular”: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

High on the walls were the flags of England, Germany and the nations that had recently played in the World Cup, for the Oliver